When Dr. Schmith's proposal for international research on infant mortality is rejected, he decides to leave East Germany and strikes a deal with an escape agency that promises him a leading position at a children's hospital in West Germany. But then the decision is reversed: the project is approved and his international colleagues want Dr. Schmith to head the GDR section. Moreover, he falls in love with his new colleague, Katharina. Schmith initially tries to ignore the arrangements he made with the escape agency, but they blackmail him. Things soon turn deadly...

It all starts with a bang. The car breaks through the crash barrier and falls off the bridge. The lights go out. After that, he is not able to see anymore. His optic nerve is severed, from now on the young stage-director Jakob is blind. His life will change and nothing will ever be the same. Jakob cannot handle the idea of never being able to see again and screams at the only woman who is able and willing to help him, Lily. A rehabilitation teacher, she helps the blind deal with the darkness. Lily has been living with it since birth, she too is blind.

The film accompanies Jenny Gröllmann, a German actress, during the last two years of her life.

They are just 17 years old when Gaby and Eva receive the offer to play in a feature film that ambitious Hamburg filmmakers want to make. Despite their youth, the girls are suspicious because they have already experienced a lot. On the other hand, that would be the opportunity to escape the difficulties they have been in for a long time. The filmmakers persuade them to cross the border illegally. The girls do not suspect that they should be used by the Springer company to provoke a scandal. But the Ministry of State Security has the action already in sight.

In the forests of the Ore Mountains, on the border with Bohemia, a gang of smugglers is up to mischief. Anyone who dares to oppose them is murdered in cold blood. The locals are paralyzed by fear of the ominous bush ghost that is said to be behind it all. Then a stranger turns up at the remote forester's lodge and begins investigating a murder that took place twenty years ago. Having become wealthy in the Alaskan gold fields, Arndt is now looking for the woman he once loved and whose perjury landed him in prison. The forester and the weaver Eduard Hauser help him with his investigations. But Hauser himself soon becomes the victim of a sinister intrigue. Fritz Seidelmann, an unscrupulous profiteer who is after Hauser's fiancée Angelika, lures him into a trap. Hauser is arrested as an alleged bush ghost. For the time being, Arndt can do nothing for him ...

The 20-year-old Berliner Wilhelm, called Willi, returns from two years as a prisoner of war to the village of Weltzow in the Havel region, where he meets Hans Graber, a former comrade from the front. Hans is now a teacher and finds Willi a job with innkeeper Brunzel. His daughter, Mrs. Leidenfrost, has been a widow for five years, as her husband was killed at the front. Over time, she begins to take a liking to Willi, but Willi is not aware of this. He is interested in the dressmaker Ulla, but skips their first meeting when he learns in the inn that Ulla has an illegitimate child.

1950, the extensive network of sewers beneath the city of Berlin. This cesspool underworld, whose sewers led from the eastern to the western part of the city and vice versa, had become the main transshipment point for a gang of criminals for their hot goods. It's a dirty business, but anyone who dared to disrupt or stop it could expect to disappear into the sewer system forever. But detective Steffens and his colleague Rödel are on the trail of the cold-blooded criminals and do everything they can to put a stop to them and put them behind bars.

A communist is released from prison in 1935 Hamburg. He tries to link up with the Party again, but is unsure as to who he can trust, and has difficulty adjusting to life in Nazi Germany.

Pranksters Moritz Bolle and Max Sturbier plague their neighbors with cruel tricks - especially young record‐seller Brigitte, whom Moritz woos by posing as a Mozart‐loving engineer. When sharp‐witted Grandma Heimdall uncovers his lies, she tailors him a reckoning, exposing his scams and bringing their mischief to an end.

The long-established aristocratic von Poggenpuhl family has seen better days. Towards the end of the 19th century, the major's widow and her children have long since eked out a poor existence characterized by a lack of money. Only the dusty ancestral gallery is a reminder of past fame and fortune. But while the mother has resigned herself to her new situation, her sons and daughters hope in vain for a change of fortune.